


Nothing's Illegal if You're Wearing Spandex

by orphan_account



Category: RuPaul's Drag Race RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, F/F, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-18
Updated: 2016-07-17
Packaged: 2018-07-24 17:34:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7517192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account





	Nothing's Illegal if You're Wearing Spandex

“What’s wrong with you?” Bob lowered his voice as they stepped into the crowded coffee shop. “Another robbery?”

Shane shook his head. “Mugging, but I did get stabbed…slightly.”

Bob looked like he wanted to ask, but decided to just get in line or the moment, they could talk about super stuff somewhere else, probably at 3am drunk at his place.

“I think I’m going to try coconut this time.” He says instead.

“Ugh, I don’t know how you drink tha- No way.” Thorgy starts, looking like he’s seen a ghost.

“What?”

“Oh fuck, shit! No way.”

“Do I have to slap you, girl? What is going on?”

“That’s the guy.” Shane whispered as he leaned a bit too close into Bob’s personal space, grabbing his arm in a death grip.

“ _What guy_?” Bob scanned the room, looking for the kind of guy that could freak out Shane in his line of work.

“The guy from the park! He must work here, oh god, he probably thinks I’m homeless. This is why I don’t leave Brooklyn, Bob!”

Bob rolled his eyes at his friend, of course the one thing a guy who spends his nights fighting evil masterminds is scared of is human interaction with another guy he has a crush on.

“You’re crazy, Thorge.” Bob looked around at his slip of the tongue, but no one was listening. “Look, just wait for me by the door and I’ll get my coffee, okay?”

“Okay!” Shane agreed quickly.

Shane was glad to avoid the embarrassment of the man recognizing him, or worse, not recognizing him.

He didn’t get a lot of chances to meet people between his unpredictable job as a substitute musician and his more unpredictable job as a superhero. In the last few months he had gotten tired of spending all his time either asleep or working and decided to go to the park and play violin for the pigeons for a while.

While he was there he caught sight of one of the cutest guys he had ever seen.

He was tall and edgy in a way that Shane never really found attractive before, but behind the haircut bordering on mohawk and the lip ring that glinted in the sun he also held himself in a way that was almost made him…adorable.

He had a resting bitch face unlike anything Shane had seen before, but when he walked by and dropped a crumpled one into Shane’s violin case it melted into a small smile that may have convinced him to come back again the next day, and the next.

And for about two months after that.

So yeah, maybe Shane had taken admiring from afar to an extreme, but he never thought that would be a problem until now. It was safe to develop a crush on someone he would probably never talk to, he could never get disappointed by them not liking him, and he could never disappoint them with his choice of career.

Thank god he had friends like Bob, who knows just how to be kind and caring when he wants to be, even if most of the time they pretended to annoy the shit out of each other.

Shane turned back towards the inside of the shop to see how Bob was doing and almost screamed.

He had looked back just in time to see Bob walk away from the counter and right up to the guy from the park who was wiping down tables in a place that was clearly out of the way for Bob, and oh god what is he doing?

Shane wanted to yell out at Bob, or jump up and tackle him, anything to get him to stop, but he also wanted to pretend he didn’t know him, maybe then the cute guy would still look at him after whatever embarrassing thing Bob is telling him. Yeah, if he made it seem like Bob was crazy this guy couldn’t hold whatever he said against him.

Unfortunately, before he could plan a way to do that Bob was pointing back at him, and oh, god the guy was looking at him, and…smiling?

_That was weird._

Bob walked past the cute guy and out the other door, and the only thing that stopped Shane from continuing to stare dumbly at the both of them was a ring from his phone.

_From Bob:_ _I gave him your number, your welcome._

_Oh._

…

Later that night Thorgy did something she rarely does, took her phone with her. She’s only slightly embarrassed to admit that, after running scared out of the coffee shop she had immediately gone home and literally laid in wait for it to ring. She knew that a smile isn’t a guarantee of anything, but damn if she wasn’t hoping.

Thorgy scanned the Brooklyn streets below her for the third time in as many minutes. It was a slow night for crime.

Luckily the increasing numbers of supers lowered the pedestrian crime rate significantly across the nation, but just as unluckily they also introduced a new set of problems, super villains. Aside from the rare theft, that was what Thorgy was on the look out for.

Thorgy remembers when she moved to Brooklyn, before she was Thorgy, fresh out of college and before the supers were really making themselves known to the public. Shane had gone to a bar with his friends and watched a drag show, it was where he met his best friend Chris, who he rarely called anything other than Bob. There he had felt really at home for the first time.

That feeling was short lived.

After sobering up until he could walk home in a straight line he left around 3am. The city that never sleeps looked a little drowsy around him as he passed empty alley after empty alley to the crowded loft he shared with two other people. It may have been premonition, or just Shane’s usual anxiety, but he didn’t like the feeling he got walking down the lonely streets, and a few blocks from his apartment he figured out why.

The crash of a beer bottle falling onto concrete could have been the work of raccoons or even a strong gust of wind, but unfortunately for Thorgy it wasn’t this time. A man jumped from the alley in front of him and brandished his weapon as closely to Shane as he could. He could feel his hands clamming up and his heartbeat in his throat, but was able to remember all of his ingrained training on how to handle this situation.

“I don’t want any trouble.” He said shakily, slowly reaching into his pocket so he wouldn’t startle him. When he reached his wallet and threw it away from both of them into the alley to give him time to escape if he decided to chase him. “Take it.”

“I don’t want your fucking money, faggot.”

For the hundredth time Shane wished he had more control over his powers, so he could do something, anything to save himself, but instead he ran. The man seemed to be alone, and the only weapon he had was a broken bottle, so Shane ran, and ran, until he lost track of where he was and where he had been. He ducked into an alley to catch his breath and prayed that the man had fallen far behind.

Shane risked a look out into the street again and, when he didn’t see anything, decided to try and find a corner to locate himself. A crash from not to far away alerted him though and he stood frozen, waiting for another indicator of what was going on. After a few seconds an extremely tall woman with a shock of blue hair and an electric yellow star across her face jumped in front of him from above.

“I think you dropped this.” She said, a wicked smile on her lips as she held out his wallet to him.

Shane still couldn’t move, but his mouth did open involuntarily.

Betty gave a short sigh and rolled her eyes in a way that made it clear he was being laughed at.

“That guy is on his way to jail now, okay?” She took his hand and curled it around the wallet. “Now go home, or do you need me to walk with you and hold your hand?”

Shane finally took the wallet and shook his head. He was only a few blocks out of the way so he started walking home until he realized he never even thanked the person who saved him.

When he turned around she was gone.

Acid Betty, who was now like an angel to him, had vanished.

Years later, when he had finally figured out his powers, and a way to use them for the good of humanity, she was still gone.

Shane still held out hope though, and as the blogs were indicating, Betty was beginning to fade back into existence recently, just small jobs in places other supers hadn’t staked their claim, but at least it was something.

Thorgy was about to head home and reflect on the mess her life had become when she heard a store alarm going off about two blocks away, it was loud and ringing in the early evening silence, likely to attract others, and definitely the police, but she decided to investigate anyway.

There was a wall full of broken windows leading into what Thorgy now recognized as one of the borough’s tackier jewelry stores. She took a deep breath to calm herself before sneaking in through one of the ones on ground level.

There was a blonde woman in a skintight red cat suit standing on a second story platform above a few passed out guards and holding an overly embellished necklace to the light to inspect it.

Before Thorgy could step in, however, a familiar face broke through the door on the other side of the building.

“Katya, get down from there! We have the building surrounded, you’re not going to win!”

Betty was bluffing, but her police contact couldn’t be too far away to make it in time to get there after whatever headache she’d have to endure with Katya.

“Come on, Betty! It’s our anniversary, give us a break!” Katya yelled down from the platform. “Besides, my name’s not Katya. It’s Barbara now.”

“You can’t just change your name every week! You’re still-”

Betty stopped, as she was speaking one of the passed out guards had stood up and morphed back into a blonde woman wearing an outfit reminiscent of Princess Power Barbie.

“Oh great, both of you? Really?” At least these two were just thieves and not violent. “Can’t you just go to the Hamptons like normal criminals?”

Betty wished she had someone around to appreciate her joke, but as soon as that thought entered her head she heard raucous laughter from above her.

“We’re just petty thieves, Betty!” Trixie sputtered out between guffaws. “Not _politicians_!”

She and Katya fell into another fit of laughter as Betty sighed.

“This is getting old.” She mumbled to herself, jumping up to the platform to subdue them both.

It was actually pretty easy to hold them off and bring them to the police. She only had to threaten the integrity of Katya’s bones once on the way down. She knew they wouldn’t be in jail for long, but in exchange for not being arrested for the amounts of collateral damage she had done to the city she had to give the cops something.

Thorgy watched as the two blondes were shoved into the back of a police car and Betty vanished into the streets behind them.

She wasn’t sure if she was glad she didn’t need to step in or ready to kick herself for squandering what would probably be her only chance to meet Acid Betty in the flesh.

Either way it was time to go home and get a few hours in incase she would be needed somewhere in the morning. But first she took out her phone to text Bob about what had just happened. She already had a text when she turned it on and her heart starting beating fast, remembering why she had brought it along in the first place. It read:

_Lunch tomorrow? I get off work at 11, don’t be late. –Jamin_

What kind of fucking name is Jamin?

…

The next day Shane arrived at the coffee shop in uptown Manhattan at 10:55, before walking in he wiped his sweaty hands on his sweater that he hoped didn’t make him look homeless and took a deep breath.

It was less crowded than the day before, and that made it easier to find ‘Jamin’

“Shane?” He asked, gathering up his keys and phone from the counter. At Shane’s nod of affirmation, he clicked his tongue. “You’re late.”

“No I’m not! I got here five minute early.”

“That’s late to me, how long have you lived here, exactly?”

“Ten years? I’m from Brooklyn.” Shane explained, wondering where he could be going with this.

“That explains it.” He rolled his eyes.

“Listen, you’re the one who asked me out, I don’t have to be here, you know!”

Jamin’s eyes widened.

“No, no, no, sorry! I just-” He sighed. “I just really hate working the morning shift, okay? I’ll try not to be a total bitch from now on.”

Jamin hated that he was already trying to self sabotage, but he was still kicking himself for sending off an invitation for a date while high on adrenaline.

“Where do you want to go?” Shane asked, not convinced.

Jamin tried to give him an apologetic smile. “I know a place.”

Once they had sat down and ordered Shane realized he had absolutely nothing to talk about, so he let the first thing on his mind tumble out.

“Did you see what Acid Betty did last night?” _Great job, Shane, way to keep the topic off of superheroes._ Shane would be kicking himself right now, but before things went any further he did want to test the waters of what this man even thought about supers.

Shane didn’t have any first hand experience, but he had heard about how things could go sour, or even violent if a civilian found out something they shouldn’t.

“Oh!” Jamin looked surprised. “Um, I don’t really keep up with that sort of thing, sorry.”

_Fairly neutral answer…maybe this will be fine._

“Me either, let’s change the subject.”

Jamin felt himself relax, he didn’t like lying and he already had to do so much of it just to keep up appearances. At least Shane seemed nice enough, he really needed a distraction from everything, and this date could lead to that.

Shane smiled at him, his eyes crinkling underneath his round glasses. “So what do you do for a living?”

Jamin smiled back at the pedestrian, but appropriate question. “I’m a graphic designer, mostly freelance stuff.” _So I can get it done in between beating up lowlifes._ He doesn’t say.

“An artist? That’s cool, I wish I could do something like that, I’m a musician, I usually just fill in when an orchestra member drops out.”

“Really? What do you play?” Jamin looked surprisingly interested. “Besides the violin, of course.”

“Viola, Cello, Piano, Guitar…” Shane checked them off his fingers as he spoke. “A little bit of kazoo, nothing good enough to get paid for but it’s my real passion.”

Jamin laughed loudly at that.

Maybe Shane was oblivious or naïve, but even when Jamin was laughing at him it didn’t seem to be out of malice.

“Oh, god.” Jamin said, covering his smiling face with his hands. “You’re a total dork, aren’t you?”

“Don’t tell anyone! It’s still a secret.” Shane laughed, glad everything was finally working out.

Later, as Shane walked home from the subway platform he couldn’t help thinking that Jamin seemed familiar somehow.


End file.
